The worst person in the world, while living, looses all consideration for how they’re treated. At that point, it’s not about what they deserve as much as it’s about living up to our own standards for how we compose ourselves.
We don’t feed evil people to rabid hogs not because they don’t deserve it, but because we respect ourselves more than that.
Likewise, everyone deserves a baseline level of dignity in death because that’s a standard we hold ourselves to.
It’s not for them.
a single nuke in orbit would emp a whole continent and destabilize climate
That’s a bit overblown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
We’ve done orbital tests before and while the effects are more than we expected, they are not continent crippling or climate destabilizing.
about 900 miles (1,450 km) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms, and damaging a telephone company microwave link. The EMP damage to the microwave link shut down telephone calls from Kauai to the other Hawaiian Islands.
It’s definitely not good, and there’s a reason we all agreed not to do that anymore, but it’s really more about the damage it does to satellites that hurts everyone, and the damage being too unstructured to be worth investigating too far.
Worth bearing in mind that we never actually retaliated against the power most closely tied to the attackers.
Most of the people involved were Saudi and they may have had Saudi assistance. Instead we invaded Afghanistan where he was for a period of time, and Iraq who had nothing to do with anything.
So Russia attacking the US could plausibly result in us suspending habeus corpus, abolishing the FDA and spending a decade embroiled in a land war in Azerbaijan.
It’s a failure of empathy. People hate and/or fear what they don’t understand.
They can’t empathize with someone not feeling right in their own skin like that, so all their rationalizations for things like “why would they want to use that bathroom” end up stemming from what they have left, which is unsavory intent, making them threatening.
Well yeah. That’s the entire point of tax incentives and all that. We want them to do something so we make it in their financial best interest for it to happen.
In this case, we made it so their interests were best served by spending an ass load of money on research and development to make EVs more broadly producible. If you yoink the rule that made them do that away, it’s not that they’ve wasted or lost that investment, but producers who weren’t bound by those rules are at a comparative advantage because they weren’t set back by the rules, and now they can continue to sell cheaper, dirtier cars for less than the bigger companies can sell clean or dirty cars.
It’s to the advantage of Tesla because reducing the sales of electric vehicles while there’s rising consumer demand makes it easier for them to sell cars at the same price with less competition.
It’s worse for the environment but “giving a shit about the planet” isn’t on the table in the current political environment. The most we can hope for is “the interests of a large company are tangentially aligned with those of the environment for once” and just run with it.
Their hosting is a couple million a year, and they have $80 million in cash, not $250.
Their cash flow from donations after expenses is about $6 million.
They absolutely cannot keep running for 400 years without further funding.
If nothing else, people are needed to run the servers and actually manage the basic operations of the foundation.
They’re definitely not in a dire financial situation, but they’re not centuries of hands off operation by any means.
Eh, the conservatives tend to have a grudge against tech companies because they skew progressive.
It’s worth remembering that evolution doesn’t select for the best as much as it selects against the worst.
The reason we have such sensitivity doesn’t have to be particularly game changing as long as it doesn’t make us less likely to reproduce.
You can plainly see our big niche adaptations being used everyday. We think good. We recognize patterns. We use tools. We walk a lot, efficiently and upright. We communicate with high precision. We have a surprisingly efficient digestive system.
We’re not busting out the ability to smell rain super often, which hints that it might be more in the “doesn’t hurt” category instead of being a big advantage.
My guess is that being able to smell disturbed soil is helpful for tracking, either where an animal has run or where something has been buried. Our ancestors were not above digging up a fresh-ish dead animal a canine had buried for later.
But it could just be that rain sense slightly more accurate than looking towards the horizon was as useful then as it is now: vaguely, I guess? It just doesn’t hurt anything.
I use this one, it’s affordable and it does a good job.
The US isn’t as entirely devoid of metric as a lot of people get the impression. We all learn it in school and are perfectly familiar with it, we just never made the switch for everyday units, so a lot of people lack the intuition around what the values mean. I can’t tell you what 25c feels like without thinking about it for a minute.
I’m curious though, does anyone not use the proper names for the elements?
Didn’t you hear? The past was always better, and Now is always the low ebb in the decline of our civilization until we return to the values that made yesterday great.
If the past is somehow to blame for the problems of today, that might mean there was something wrong with the past. If that’s the case, then maybe other things from the past have problems, including things that I like or benefit me personally, or that changing would imply a lot of big scary changes that I’m not ready for.
That’s why attempts to talk about little mistakes from the past like chattel slavery, indigenous genocide, phillipino genocide or endemic discrimination and institutionalized racism are just attempts by bad people to tear down perfection and keep us from returning to a simpler, better time where those mistakes never happened.
Definitely agree 100%.
The cop thing is weird. In all the cases where (extremist) people talk about wanting to use the military that would normally be handled by the police, like crowd control, detaining large numbers of people, or systematic checkpoints and door to do searches, I’d actually prefer the military to the cops. Not because they’ll push back or violate civil liberties any less, but because military training is consistent and actually happens, so when someone shoves them at a checkpoint the training they regress to will be at least of a higher baseline quality than the average cop.
require the House Sergeant at Arms and their staff to demand to see the genitalia of anyone who wants to use any gender-specific House restroom
Each time as well. Can never be too careful with those transgenerators. Never know when someone’s gonna pop out and switch things up to get access to the closer toilet.
Never. There’s no space in their oath for fragging their commander in response to a legal order.
At the highest level, doing so is a military coup, and directly opposed to their oath.
Rounding up innocent Americans and putting them in camps isn’t unconstitutional if you pass a law saying you can do it. Just ask the Japanese citizens of the country of the military stood up for them, or if they just accepted their legal orders.
Relying on the military, the violent arm of the state, to protect us from the civilian arm of the state is at best not going to happen. More likely it’s so much worse if they do, because they typically don’t turn control over to someone better, if they do at all.
NAS. Most things sit in downloads indefinitely, and I’ll randomly decide the folder is gross and unmanageable and put things into appropriate folders. Usually Documents gets the most sub-categories, with various significant life docs sorted by category and year. Pictures gets random art I made in a folder, pictures, memes and funny shit, etc also get their own folders.
Media downloads go straight to the NAS where they’re organized by Format/Category/Series/Name. As in Video/Movies/John wick/John wick 1. TV gets a season level in there.
More like cereal infiltrating your bowl of cereal after being poured out of an unlabeled clear bag.
“You’re never gonna believe this, but someone snuck Cheerios into my bowl while I was pouring from this sack! The container wasn’t labeled, so I couldn’t possibly have known what was inside, despite it being plainly visible and entirely out in the open”
Why the fuck do we care what musk thinks about anything? Jesus fuck just ignore the asshole. His endorsement means nothing.
I mean, the human will to evil and the military leadership being willing to listen to political evil are in alignment in this case. So if the military is ordered to do some camps, they’re gonna do some camps.
You just always here a lot of talk about how much the military is focused on not doing atrocities, and it’s tossed out as a knowing trump card whenever talk of the military doing stuff on US soil comes up.
“The army would never torch a subdivision in Milwaukee, the houses look like their houses, the people look like them, and they get too much training telling them not to evil in specific ways in specific contexts”. It misses that the same people who explained the rules are the ones who’ll be telling them to do the evil, and that our soldiers aren’t better or worse than any other, morally. And soldiers regularly do evil in places that look like their homes, to people who look like their families.
The integrity of the military is just not a barrier to them being used to do bad things ™ domestically.
We have plenty of examples of soldiers merrily war-criming their way into history in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It doesn’t matter how many power points you watch, it doesn’t make a soldier not a soldier, and soldiers are defined by signing up to maybe do a bit of unprovoked violence.
They may or may not get punished for it later, but the sheer number of civilian casualties in both those wars makes it abundantly clear that killing civilians isn’t the hard line we like to think it is. We just need to tell the pilot that it’s a valid target, and chances are they’ll bomb that wedding.
Humans are pretty willing to do messed up stuff in war. All that training is what gets you to the point where it’s a coin toss, and not perfect willingness to engage in collective punishment, reprisal killing, intimidation murder or just plain “shooting through the windshields of cars for fun”.
That one also has the aspect of avoiding a deliberate insult. Desecrate the corpse and you risk turning it into a Thing™ that people might rally around.
killing him does that too, but people rally a little less around a relatively restrained killing of a valid military target and unremarkable handling of the body.